Gender and Ethnic Conflict
in ex-Yugoslavia

by Adam Jones

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17: 1 (1994), pp. 115-34.

[Note: for citation purposes, a new page in the text as originally
published in Ethnic and Racial Studies is indicated by square brackets
and a bolded page number, e.g., "a more nuanced and inclusive approach
[116] to the gender variable is warranted."]

NOW PUBLISHED!

Edited by
Adam Jones

Vanderbilt University Press, 2004

The most wide-ranging book ever published on gender-selective
mass killing, or "gendercide," this collection of essays is
also the first to explore systematically the targeting of non-combatant
"battle-age" males in various wartime and peacetime contexts.

Abstract

The influence of gender on patterns of ethnic violence in ex-Yugoslavia
has commanded considerable international attention. This article acknowledges
the groundbreaking role of feminist scholarship in bringing the gender
variable to the forefront in analyses of political and interpersonal violence.
However, feminist applications of gender frameworks are to some extent
constrained by feminism's normative commitments. The present article argues
for a more balanced and inclusive understanding of the role gender plays
in conditioning the actions and experiences of men and women alike, in
the Balkans war and other conflicts. Towards this end, a detailed evaluation
of gender-specific and gender-selective violence in ex-Yugoslavia is presented,
with particular attention to the group that appears to constitute the majority
of victims - males between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five. The article
concludes by stressing the importance of the gender variable in analysing
ethnic and political violence, and suggests that a more nuanced approach
to this variable's operations would shed important light on ethnic violence
in ex-Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

Introduction

With the recent explosion of media coverage
surrounding systematic rape by Serbian occupation forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
the gender dimension of the ethnic conflict in ex-Yugoslavia has moved
to the forefront of public discussion. There is every reason to believe
that scholarship will follow suit, devoting more serious attention to a
variable in this war - perhaps all wars - that is rarely explicitly acknowledged
and almost never addressed at a theoretical level.

The groundbreaking analysis of gender in
ethnic and political studies has been carried out by feminist scholars.
While much of this body of work is powerfully illuminating, feminism is
in some respects constrained by its normative commitments - and by the
distinctive "standpoint" from which these commitments arise. As Rebecca
Grant notes (1991: 94), "the effort to work within a feminist epistemology
can never stray completely from the prime task of working from women's
experiences," and most feminist scholars would view this orientation as
primary. I argue here that a more nuanced and inclusive approach

[116] to the gender variable is
warranted. It should devote consideration to "men qua men" - that
is, to men as bearers of masculinity, and to the distinctive life experiences
that derive from maleness (Brod, 1987: 2).(1)

This article takes such an approach to
the subject of gender and ethnic conflict in ex-Yugoslavia. Many of its
observations are necessarily tentative and preliminary. I am primarily
interested in establishing frameworks and avenues for future research and
fieldwork. Given the familiarity of many basic feminist critiques - and
given the feminist orientation of much current commentary on human rights
in ex-Yugoslavia - I devote somewhat more space here to "the other side"
of gender-linked victimization in the Balkan conflict.

Women: "A Pattern of Rape," and More

Several Chetniks [Serbian irregular
forces] arrived. One, a man around 30, ordered me to follow him into the
house. I had to go. He started looking for money, jewelry and other valuables.
He wanted to know where the men were. I didn't answer. Then he ordered
me to undress. I was terribly afraid. I took off my clothes, feeling that
I was falling apart. The feeling seemed under my skin; I was dying, my
entire being was murdered. I closed my eyes, I couldn't look at him. He
hit me. I fell. Then he lay on me. He did it to me. I cried, twisted
my body convulsively, bled. I had been a virgin.

He went out and invited two Chetniks
to come in. I cried. The two repeated what the first one had done to me.
I felt lost. I didn't even know when they left. I don't know how long I
stayed there, lying on the floor alone, in a pool of blood.

My mother found me. I couldn't
imagine anything worse. I had been raped, destroyed and terribly hurt.
But for my mother this was the greatest sorrow of our lives. We both cried
and screamed. She dressed me.

I would like to be a mother some
day. But how? In my world, men represent terrible violence and pain. I
cannot control that feeling. ("E., age 16," one of the rape victims whose
accounts are reprinted in Drakuli, 1992. Emphasis in original.)

In late 1992 and early 1993, the issue of
women rape victims among the civilian population of Bosnia-Herzegovina
emerged into public view. A spate of media reports along the lines of Newsweek's
cover-story pointed to "A Pattern of Rape" in the beleaguered Bosnian-Herzegovinan
state (Newsweek, 1993).(2) The number
of rape victims is a [117] matter of considerable dispute, but estimates
range as high as 20,000 (European Community figures) to 50,000 (the Sarajevo
State Commission for Investigation of War Crimes) (Drakuli, 1993: 270).(3)

Media reports were buttressed by an Amnesty
International investigation of "Rape and sexual abuse by armed forces"
in Bosnia-Herzegovina (January 1993). Amnesty wrote that "abuses against
women, including rape, have been widespread." Though these abuses have
been committed by "all sides" in the conflict, "Muslim women have been
the chief victims and the main perpetrators have been members of Serbian
armed forces." According to Amnesty,

The available evidence indicates that
in some cases the rape of women has been carried out in an organized or
systematic way, with the deliberate detention of women for the purpose
of rape and sexual abuse. Incidents involving the sexual abuse of women
appear to fit into a wider pattern of warfare, characterized by intimidation
and abuses against Muslims and Croats which have led thousands to flee
or to be compliant when expelled from their home areas out of fear of further
violations. (Amnesty International, 1993a.)

The Amnesty investigation sought to identify
contexts in which women were particularly vulnerable to rape and sexual
abuse. It noted instances where "military personnel, policemen, paramilitaries
or those in authority, either as individuals or as groups, use their strength
and position of authority to take advantage of women in the areas over
which they have short- or long-term control." Likewise, Amnesty pointed
to "places of detention centres where women are held, although not specifically
for rape or sexual abuse," and most notorious of all the so-called "rape
camps," "detention centres which appear to have been organized solely or
mainly for the rape or sexual abuse of women" (Amnesty International, 1993a:
4-5).(4)

Much commentary on the rape issue has pointed
to the prevalence of rape as a feature of war and political violence more
generally, often drawing on Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will
for documentation of the historical trend (Brownmiller, 1975, esp. Chaps.
3-4). As Brownmiller has argued in that book, and more recently in the
Balkan context,(5) rape is a double-edged
weapon in war. It is aimed not only at the exploitation and humiliation
of the victim, but at the morale of the population as a whole. It can also
be an instrument of revenge for acts blamed on the victim's relatives.
In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Amnesty International notes that women have often
been

singled out ... as a form of retribution
because of the perpetrators' presumptions of the actions or intentions
of the women's male relatives. The humiliation is often reinforced by carrying
out the acts in [118] front of others, sometimes including male
relatives of the victims. (Amnesty International, 1993a: 5)

In Brownmiller's view (1975: 31), the suffering
of the victim is often "appropriated" by males against whom the act is
also aimed: "The act that is played out upon [the rape victim] is a message
passed between men - vivid proof of victory for one and loss and defeat
for the other." Rape also plays an important part in bolstering the morale
and sense of power of occupation forces: "We were told we would fight better
if we raped the women," as a young Serb soldier told Newsweek (1993:
14).

The unusual aspect of rape as a tool of
war in Bosnia-Herzegovina is its relationship to the wider Serbian strategy
of "ethnic cleansing," with its genocidal overtones. In the words of Slavenka
Drakuli:

What seems to be unprecedented
about the rapes of Muslim women in Bosnia (and, to a lesser extent, the
Croat women too) is that there is a clear political purpose behind
the practice. The rapes in Bosnia are not only a standard tactic of war,
they are an organized and systematic attempt to cleanse (to move, resettle,
exile) the Muslim population from certain territories Serbs want to conquer
in order to establish a Greater Serbia. The eyewitness accounts and reports
state that women are raped everywhere and at all times, and victims are
of all ages, from 6 to 80. They are also deliberately impregnated in great
numbers ... held captive and released only after abortion becomes impossible.
This is so they will "give birth to little Chetniks," the women are told.
(Drakuli, 1993: 271)(6)

In addition to impregnation by Serbian forces,
an element in the ethnic-cleansing campaign seems to be the recognition
that sexual trauma associated with rape will inhibit Bosnian (and to a
lesser extent Croatian) women's reproductive role for decades to come.

It should also be pointed out that the
act of rape is not always "bounded" by respect for the actual life of the
victim. Reports exist of victims being executed after rape. Even for the
large majority of victims that survive the experience, the fear of death
is present throughout. Activist Marsha Jacobs, who visited Croatia with
the Balkan Women's Relief Committee early in 1993 to interview women refugees
from the war zones (including many rape victims), argues that "The real
issue of rape is people are afraid they're going to be killed. The terror
is that this other person has total control over you and can overpower
you. It seems there's no reason not to be killed. Rape itself is a terrible
experience, but you can live with it. What's [119] really going
on in terms of fear is the terror of being exterminated."

Intriguingly, Jacobs found among the women
she interviewed a general concern that the issue of rape not be stressed
at the expense of the alleged Serbian campaign of slaughter and genocide
against the civilian population of Bosnia-Herzegovina, male and female
alike. "They didn't want in any way to let the rape overshadow the real
problem, which is the extermination and execution of thousands and thousands
of men and women" (Jacobs, 1993).

Refugees and Gender

The focus on women victims of rape and other
sexual abuse has to some extent overshadowed another type of victimization
that has disproportionately targeted Balkan women. I refer to the flow
of refugees from occupied territories in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
This is by far the most massive demographic upheaval in post-World War
II European history: an estimated 800,000 refugees have fled the war zones
at time of writing.

The central variables that operate to determine
the composition of refugee flows in the conflict are sex and age - primarily
the former. While both sexes appear to be strongly represented among very
young and very old refugees (with perhaps a slight underrepresentation
of old men), all evidence indicates that the overwhelming number of young
and middle-aged adults are women. There are, of course, two ways of looking
at this disparity. On the one hand, it means that the always traumatic
and often horrendous experience of fleeing is a predominantly "female"
one, at least among young and middle-aged adults. On the other hand, the
option or ability to flee seems to be open disproportionately
to women (along with children and the elderly), a matter discussed in greater
detail below.

Gender-Specific Massacres of Women

In at least two instances cited by the U.S.
State Department in its October 1992 report to the United Nations, largescale
massacres of women may have occurred. The State Department report alleges
that, on 20 July 1992, approximately 100 Muslim women were executed - shot
in the back - by Serb attackers in the town of Biscani, a community that
also witnessed some of the most brutal gender-selective atrocities against
males (Helsinki Watch, 1993: 82-83). One of the rare instances of mass
slaughter of Serbians, on 27 August 1992, also targeted women together
with children. A Croatian attack [120] on a bus convoy departing
the town of Gorazde reportedly left about 53 Serbian women and children
dead and another 50 wounded (Vancouver Sun, 1992).(7)

One difference between gender-specific
massacres of women and men in the Balkan conflict is that such actions,
when directed against women, do not seem to be gender-selective.
That is, instances of women being separated from men and marked
off for execution seem virtually unknown - though the reverse is common,
as we will see. Instead, massacres of women seem to occur when a target
group for reasons that are closely tied to gender happens to be composed
of women (perhaps along with children and/or the elderly). Thus, young-
and middle-aged adult civilians massacred in occupied towns and villages
will tend to be women if men are elsewhere under arms, or incarcerated,
or already dead. Likewise, attacks on refugee convoys (such as the 27 August
assault) will tend to feature a predominance of female victims - given
the gender disparity among refugees, noted earlier.

The range of women's victimization experiences
thus seems to some extent derivative of other factors. But a secondary
link to gender is clear nonetheless. And in the case of sexual assault,
abuse, and exploitation, the gender variable assumes primary significance.
Such atrocities appear to constitute the central, perhaps the sole, case
"where women have been subjected to special forms of human rights abuses
which they face primarily because of their sex."(8)

Men: The Absent Subjects

By contrast with the direct investigation
that is possible into women's victimization experiences (as a result of
the ready availability of refugee testimony and the recent publicity concerning
victims of rape and sexual assault), men's experiences in the Balkan conflict
must be approached more obliquely. In fact, in many cases, the researcher
encounters an absence of subjects for investigation. Drawing the
appropriate conclusions is, accordingly, more difficult. But the effort
is vital if we seek to understand the complex influence of gender on liability
to violent victimization.

What do we mean by "absent subjects"? Consider
the following vignettes from media reports of the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia:

The perpetrators [of rape] may
exploit the vulnerability of women of the subjugated nationalities whose
husbands or male relatives are often absent (in some cases in detention).
(Amnesty International, 1993a: 4)

[121] In their zeal to
"cleanse" northern Bosnia of its Muslims and Croats, Serbs who seized control
of the region have deported thousands of unarmed civilians in sealed freight
trains in the past month. Hundreds of women, children and old people have
been packed into each freight car for sweltering journeys lasting three
or more days into central Bosnia, according to refugees who survived the
ordeal.(9)

They [female rape victims] barely
survived the terrors of the war; many have lost family members or have
husbands and sons who are still fighting there, or are held in concentration
camps or have disappeared and it's not known if they are alive or dead.
If the women talk [about their experiences], they could jeopardize the
men's lives. (Drakuli, 1993: 270)

To refer back briefly to the previous section,
my contention is that many of women's gender-specific experiences - as
victims of rape, expulsion, and sometimes murder - exist against a backdrop
of, and in many instances are predicated on, other kinds of victimization
that disproportionately target males. Thus, Serbian occupation forces
often have a freer rein to rape and terrorize women because males of the
community are dead, incarcerated in concentration camps, serving in the
defense forces, or in hiding to avoid the same.(10)
The refugees who bring with them such grim tales are overwhelmingly women,
children, and the elderly, and they often tell tales of the largescale
summary execution or mass incarceration of their communities' men. This
reflects a subtly two-sided process of gender selectivity and specificity
- a process that operates among occupied or threatened populations themselves,(11)
is central to the occupation policies of invaders, and may be exacerbated
by a host regime at the other end of the refugees' journey.

The patterns at least seem worthy of further
investigation. I offer below a range of phenomena and issue-areas that
appear to contain a male-specific gender dimension.

The Male as Combatant

The overwhelming majority of combatants in
the Balkan conflict are male, volunteers and conscripts alike. Virtually
all of those committing atrocities in the former Yugoslavia are men,(12)
as are those on the ground who order the atrocities committed, and those
higher up the chain of command who determine overall strategy and turn
a blind eye when necessary. The gender dimension to both the planning and
perpetration of violent atrocity is intuitive, and requires no further
discussion here.

[122] In the Balkan conflict, the
overwhelming predominance of males among combatants appears to be matched
by a predominance of men among war casualties. It is true that in wars
such as that wracking ex-Yugoslavia - where battle-lines are not clearly
drawn, and sizeable civilian populations are under siege or occupation
- one can expect the gender disparity among victims to be reduced. It is
also true that no reliable statistics exist on overall deaths in the Balkan
conflict, let alone the proportion of those deaths suffered by men versus
women. Nonetheless, as Neier (1993) notes, "as in most wars, anecdotal
accounts suggest that the majority of those who have died [in the Balkan
conflict] are men." This is quite likely an understatement, particularly
in light of men's disproportionate presence (and unusually brutal treatment)
in concentration camps, along with their indisputably low degree of representation
among refugees who have fled to safety.

Keep in mind, too, the earlier point that
an age variable often operates to determine the male experience in civil
conflict. Young boys and old men tend to fall outside the category of actual
or perceived/potential combatants. The rape phenomenon aside, their
position seems roughly to approximate that of women. That is, they are
more likely than battle-age men to seek or be granted passage out of the
war-zone; to reach safe haven; and to be granted refugee status by authorities
in the neighbouring state of Croatia. To be established with greater precision,
these contentions would have to be tested by field investigators (for example,
through analysis of Red Cross and UNHCR refugee rolls). For present purposes,
though, the discussion of "male experiences" refers primarily to men of
"combat age," between 16 and 60 years old.

In what ways does the male-as-combatant
motif shape the experiences of men in the Balkan war zones?

Forcible conscription.

As in most wars, the largescale conscription of young and middle-aged males
into armed "service" is a defining feature of the Balkan landscape. It
is, of course, impossible to gauge the extent to which forces on both sides
have resorted to coercive measures to draw males into the fighting forces;
to what extent that service is voluntarily undertaken; and how far even
"voluntary" service reflects patterns of gender conditioning and prefabricated
role expectations.

A standard stereotype in much feminist
commentary on war and political violence depicts men as enthusiastic participants
in slaughter. Hence Susan Brownmiller's derisive (1993) comment that "Balkan
men have proved eager to fight and die for their particular subdivision
of Slavic [123] ethnicity."(13)
Against this stereotype can be set evidence like the following:

ZAGREB - There can be no sanctuary
in Croatia for Bosnian soldiers trying to flee the fighting in their homeland,
President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia made clear yesterday.

In scenes of anguish during the
past two days at Split quayside, nearly 4,000 Bosnian men have been forced
shouting and screaming by Croatian military police into buses returning
them to their war-torn republic.

"Croatia, which already has accepted
400,000 refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina, cannot undertake to care for
those who in conditions of war should stay on the battlefield and defend
their homes against the aggressor," Mr. Tudjman said. (Sherwell, 1992a,
emphasis added.)

Similar sentiments were evident during the
extraordinary early stage of the Balkan conflict, when the central Yugoslav
authorities briefly sought to prevent the secession of Slovenia. Busloads
of anxious parents travelled from Belgrade to Llubljana to visit conscripted
male relatives who had been interned in Slovenia, and to protest the actions
of politicians in Belgrade who had placed the soldiers' lives in danger.
Whatever "eagerness" the young men in question felt for the war effort
against Slovenia was apparently rather ephemeral:

Fresh-faced and homesick, captured
Yugoslav soldiers in Slovenia say they thought they were going to defend
their country against an Italian attack when they were ordered to seize
border crossings. ... Most [of those captured] are young conscripts who
appear to have little idea what the fighting was about. ... Many of the
captured soldiers are little older than the schoolchildren whose paintings
still adorn the walls [of the schoolhouse where they were interned]. Several
said they had no idea why they were ordered to seize border crossings and
many admitted they had given up without firing a shot. "Our lieutenant
just said: 'Let's surrender!" said one. ... The general view among 12 prisoners
interviewed was that Yugoslavia's problems have to be resolved without
bloodshed. (Sherwell, 1992a)

Other rebukes to the familiar image of males
as eager fighters and victims can be extracted from accounts of refugee
flows out of Bosnia-Herzegovina.(14) This
brings us to another important application of the gender variable to ethnic
conflict in ex-Yugoslavia: the extent to which males have been denied the
opportunity to flee war zones and claim refugee status. This sometimes
reflect a fear on the part of Bosnian authorities that the departure of
males will strip the country of the means of resistance. More commonly,
the process of gender selection [124] is instituted and implemented
by Serb forces guarding checkpoints. They have repeatedly made plain their
unwillingness to let through any fighting-age males - presumably for fear
that male refugees might subsequently join the anti-Serb resistance once
safely out of Serb-besieged communities (Smith, 1992: 14).(15)

Remarkably, the United Nations and other
international agencies involved in refugee evacuation have tended to accommodate
themselves to the blatantly discriminatory rules laid down by Serb occupiers.
At time of writing (April 1993), for example, the news from Bosnia centres
on protracted attempts to secure the evacuation of civilians from the besieged
town of Srebrenica. Convoys of trucks have evacuated women, children, and
old people. But the Serbian requirement that no males with combat potential
be carried out overland has been respected - as a glance at photographs
of the evacuation convoys makes clear.

Again, a certain voluntary element likely
features here. The "women and children first" rule seems as operative among
besieged populations as it once was for ocean-liner passengers abandoning
ship. But it must also be relevant that, as the New York Times reports,
"during evacuation from cities and towns surrendered to Serbian fighters
in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia, Serbian militia-men
have summarily executed men of fighting age" (Sudetic, 1993).(16)

Retributory or "pre-emptive" execution.

The most serious atrocities committed
against males primarily on gender grounds are the gender-selective executions
aimed at eliminating physical resistance to Serbian occupation and "ethnic
cleansing" - up to the point of eliminating future generations of fighters.
McKinsey describes the Bosnian Serb forces' "usual tactics of 'ethnic cleansing"'
as "surrounding non-Serb villages, killing the men, raping the women
and burning the houses" (McKinsey, 1993, emphasis added). Sherwell (1992b),
recounting the Serbian occupation of Zenica in Bosnia, points to the Serbian
practice of touring town streets in trucks and vans, scouring the community
for "mainly young and middle-aged men." A local munitions worker told him:

My son's house was between the
two bridges [on the Drina River]. They [the Serbs] drove the trucks containing
the men up to the bridges, unloaded them and forced them to bend over the
walls. ... Then they massacred them - some they slit the throats, some
[were killed] with a knife in the back, some they shot. Their bodies were
dumped in the Drina.

[125] In 1992, a Reuters journalist
quoted a 44-year-old Muslim woman's description of the arrival of Chetnik
irregulars in her village. "They took our menfolk away without letting
them say goodbye or put their shoes on." The dispatch quoted witnesses
who said "victims were taken away in trucks and then shot in pairs before
being dumped and hastily covered with earth." Mass graves uncovered soon
thereafter were filled "about 90 percent" with "middle-aged or elderly
Muslim men" (Sherwell, 1992b).

Meanwhile, according to a Southam News
report, "Bosnian Mersudina Hodzic, 17, living in a room at the Zagreb mosque,
said all the male members of her family were massacred by Serbs last month.
She was calm and unemotional as she told of watching the murder of her
father, 15-year-old brother, five uncles, grandfather and other male relatives."
Activist Marsha Jacobs reports that "Many of the women I met had seen their
husbands executed in front of them, and then their older male children
taken away. Other women had missing husbands and sons, and missing pretty
much means dead" (Jacobs, 1993).

Helsinki Watch's massive volume on war
crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina is replete with accounts of invading Serb
troops separating men from women and older men from "combat-age" men, then
carrying out largescale summary executions, beatings, torture, and detention
of males. After the town of Caravko fell to Serbian forces in July 1992,
"F.S.," a 30-year-old Muslim woman, told of "Our men [having] to hide.
My husband was with us, but hiding. I saw my uncle being beaten on July
25 when there was a kind of massacre. The Serbs were searching for arms.
Three hundred men were killed that day" (Helsinki Watch, 1993: 82). In
the Bosnian town of Biscani, another Muslim housewife testified, with horrifying
matter-of-factness:

They were shelling our village
[while] I was in a shelter. Some men got away. Those who were in their
homes were beaten, tortured and killed by the Cetniks. ... We came out
of the shelter. They were looking for men. They got them all together.
We saw them beating the men. We heard the sounds of the shooting. One man
survived the executions. They killed his brother and father. Afterwards
the women buried the men. (Helsinki Watch, 1993: 82-83)(17)

The largest gender-specific slaughter to come
to international attention - though, again, with little note taken of the
gender dimension - was the August 1992 massacre at Ugar Gorge in Bosnia,
reported by one of just seven known survivors last October. [1998 note:
This has since been surpassed by the slaughter of thousands of men in fields
outside Srebrenica in 1995.] It highlights the contrast with [126]
massacres of women, discussed earlier, containing as it does a gender-selective
as well as a gender-specific dimension.

"At about 8 o'clock in the morning on Aug.
21, the Serbs brought five city buses to [the Bosnian detention centre
of] Trnopolje," the survivor told Time. "Women and children filled
about half of one, and they ordered men to fill the rest." At the Ugar
River, the buses were stopped. Serb forces "chose about 250 people, all
men between about 16 and 50, and put us back on two buses." Half an hour
later, the massacre began:

It was very quiet. Then a soldier
came in and pointed to a man at the front and said, "You." They got out,
and we heard a single shot. Then another Serb came in and said to the soldier
on board, "Now get two out." More shots. Then we realized it was over,
there was no life for us. They started taking people by threes, and we
heard machine-gun bursts along with pistol shots. (Quoted in Graff, 1992)(18)

An important additional variable in some executions
of males appears to be community prominence. This correlates closely with
gender, given the global predominance of men among political, intellectual,
and economic elites. An integral part of the process of "ethnic cleansing"
in Bosnia-Herzegovina includes the rounding-up, incarceration, and/or execution
of prominent members of the community: mayors, other officials, teachers,
intellectuals, and so on. This element is indirectly brought out in Newsweek's
feature report on "rape [as] an integral part of ethnic cleansing":

In such Bosnian towns as Brcko, Kotor Varos,
Zvornik, leading citizens anyone who owned a business, participated in
the Party of Democratic Action, held a university degree were hunted down
and liquidated. The rest of the male population was packed off to
prison camps. (Newsweek, 1993, emphasis added)(19)

Incarceration.

The most vivid evidence of male-specific victimization to arouse international
protest was turned up by outside investigation of Bosnian Serb "prison
camps" established in occupied territory. While both women and men have
been detained, the two "most brutal" camps - Omarska and Keraterm, both
closed after international protests in late August 1992 - were overwhelmingly
male-dominated (Helsinki Watch, 1993: 33).(20)
In many instances, it also appears that the gender- and age-based separation
process carried out by occupying forces led to men being detained [127]
while women and children were allowed to flee the area as refugees.(21)

Amnesty International (1993b: 2) notes
instances in which "some refugee convoys leaving Serbian controlled territory
have been stopped and some men separated from their families and arbitrarily
imprisoned." The organization also cites testimony from civilian women
concerning "the arbitrary imprisonment of their men." The function of this
gender-selective procedure seems plain: the camps are designed to incarcerate
males who might join or be conscripted into Bosnian or Croatian resistance
forces.

Conditions inside the camps have received
extensive publicity in the West, though again with the gender dimension
usually lacking as a primary concern:

What prisoners most feared were
the regular beatings which usually occurred at night, often after the [Serbian]
soldiers had apparently been drinking heavily. "The most terrible thing
was waiting for your name to be called out," recalled one former prisoner.
... The selected prisoner was usually taken to another building about 15
metres away, from which the other prisoners could hear screams of pain.
One or more guards would kick the prisoner, punch him and beat him with
wooden truncheons. The victim was returned to the cell usually after a
period of between 30 minutes and two hours, usually extensively bruised.
(Amnesty International, 1993b: 10)

Amnesty International provides accounts of
inmates whose beatings left them "black and blue everywhere. One couldn't
find a place big enough to stick in a needle that wasn't bruised." "When
I was undressed my arms looked ... as if they had been inflated with a
pump for car tyres" (Amnesty International, 1993b: 11-12). Testimony gathered
by Helsinki Watch included accounts like the following, from a female detainee:

Most of the prisoners brought
to Omarska were men, ranging in age from fifteen to about fifty-five. They
most frequently arrived in a paddy wagon, although some arrived in buses.
All were beaten as soon as they emerged from the vehicle. They were then
beaten against the wall and thrown into various buildings on the camp grounds.
... We saw the men being tortured. They were beaten with braided cable
wires. Pipes filled with lead were also used to beat the men. ... The most
traumatic experience for me was to see all the corpses. ... Sometimes there
was a lesser number of bodies - twenty or thirty - but usually there were
more. (Helsinki Watch, 1993: 102-03)

[128] It is clear that largescale deaths
and executions occurred in the camps, although the extent to which this
represents a systematic pattern of extermination à la the
Nazi death camps of World War II remains a subject of controversy. Helsinki
Watch (1993: 105) reports that "most of the deaths that occurred at [Omarska]
were a result of bestial beatings," but "some prisoners appear to have
been summarily executed or shot by firing squads."(22)

Occupied
Territories: A Climate of Fear

It is apparent from accounts offered by rape
victims that women are by no means immune to abuse, harassment, and victimization
- up to and including torture and murder - at the hands of occupying forces
in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Nonetheless, Amnesty International's investigation
of the situation in the Serb-controlled town of Bosanski Petrovac suggests
a disproportionate male vulnerability to victimization reflected
in a pervasive climate of fear that affects men more than others in occupied
communities.

"Muslim men, in particular, have said that
because of the growing fear they tried to avoid walking in the streets
of Bosanski Petrovac, even during the day," Amnesty reports. Later, the
report notes that "Some Muslim men, who felt especially at risk, slept
away from their homes in places such as orchards. Women slept in the basements
of their houses." The reasons for the fear are not hard to ascertain. First
of all, males in Bosanski Petrovac have great difficulty leaving the occupied
areas, if they choose to do so:

Even after being assured safe
passage, some refugee convoys leaving Serbian controlled territory have
been stopped and some men separated from their families and arbitrarily
imprisoned. ... In about May [1992] roadblocks were set up around the town
and while initially most people were allowed to pass, by June there were
reports of Muslims being prevented from leaving at these checkpoints, particularly
if they were males of military age or appeared to be leaving with many
of their possessions.

In addition to facing "arbitrary imprisonment,"
men released from custody "were still required to report to the police
every morning and evening." "Civilian men of military age" living in the
town were also "required by the Serbian authorities to do forced labour"
- ditch-digging, field work, and fence-construction, among other duties.
(All quotes from Amnesty International, 1992b.)

Conscription is also a constant threat
contributing to the climate of fear. Helsinki Watch investigators visited
the Bosnian town of Banja [129] Luka in August 1992 and "spoke to
Muslims who said that a succession of five draft notices had been issued
to men in the Banja Luka area since the beginning of the war in April 1992":

Mobilization calls were reportedly
broadcast on the radio. Those who responded were given mobilization slips,
which allowed them to go to work. Those who refused to join the [Bosnian]
Serb Army - mostly Muslims and Croats - were not given the necessary papers
that allowed them to enter their places of employment. Because they were
not able to go to work, many were fired from their jobs. Those interviewed
said that until recently, they have "lived like rats," not daring to leave
their homes. (Helsinki Watch, 1993: 49)

Also reporting from Banja Luka, McKinsey (1993)
describes the plight of one woman whose "husband hasn't left their house
for more than a year, ever since he refused to be inducted into the Yugoslav
army or the Bosnian Serb army fighting to destroy internationally recognized
Bosnia. Some of his friends who also refused to serve the Serbs were snatched
off the street and thrown in prison."

Conclusion

The analytical framework adopted in this article
can only be a provisional one, given the context of intense and ongoing
conflict in ex-Yugoslavia. Two serious constraints must be acknowledged.
First, the range and reliability of the statistical information emerging
from ex-Yugoslavia is limited. In many cases, "the numbers being bandied
about appear to have little basis in careful, independent fact-finding"
(Neier, 1993), and are subject to manipulation by all sides for propaganda
purposes.(24) Second, the body of scholarly
analysis of the course of conflict in ex-Yugoslavia (as opposed
to its underlying causes) is all but nonexistent.

This article has relied, accordingly, on
two main sources: mass-media reports and human rights investigations. Under
these circumstances, no more than a "rough draft" of events and underlying
trends is possible. The propositions offered here require extensive research
and field investigation to test their validity.

A more basic critique of existing approaches
can be advanced with greater confidence. It centres on the fact that the
gender variable, inclusively approached, is remarkably under-represented
in the literature on ethnic conflict, revolution, and political violence.
Perhaps the pathbreaking efforts of feminist scholars - with their normative
commitment to the alleviation of social injustice and human suffering -
[130] could usefully be supplemented by broader, more nuanced investigations
along the lines proposed here.(25)

Books about gender and international relations
from Amazon.com

Notes

1. A common feminist riposte
is that most fields of study in patriarchal society have been dominated
by male figures and "masculinist" themes. Brod, though, argues that "While
seemingly about men, traditional scholarship's treatment of generic
man as the human norm in fact systematically excludes from consideration
what is unique to men qua men. The overgeneralization from male
to generic human experience not only distorts our understanding of what,
if anything, is truly generic to humanity but also precludes the study
of masculinity as a specific male experience, rather than a universal
paradigm for human experience. The most general definition of men's
studies is that it is the study of masculinities and male experiences as
specific and varying socialhistoricalcultural formations. Such studies
situate masculinities as objects of study on a par with femininities, instead
of elevating them to universal norms." (In Brod, ed., 1987: 2.)

2. For a representative
sampling of other media reports, see Halsell, 1993; "Women: the targets
of terror," Montreal Gazette, 23 November 1992; "Serbs accused of
using rape as tool of war," The Vancouver Sun (from the London Independent),
6 January 1993, A8; "Rape becomes 'a weapon of war,"' The New York Times,
10 January 1993; Tamar Lewin, "The Balkans rapes: a legal test for the
outraged," The New York Times, 15 January 1993.

3. Both of these figures
are for the period ending in October 1992. For criticism of the "competition
to come up with greater numbers of rapes in Bosnia than everyone else,"
see Neier, 1993: 259. (Neier is executive director of Human Rights Watch,
which subsumes the organization Helsinki Watch.)

4. The term "rape camps"
is not actually used in the Amnesty report.

5. For specific comments
on rape in ex-Yugoslavia, see Brownmiller, 1993: 37. "Sexual sadism arises
with astonishing rapidity in ground warfare, when the penis becomes justified
as a weapon in a logistical reality of unarmed noncombatants, encircled
and trapped. Rape of a doubly dehumanized object - as woman, as enemy -
carries its own terrible logic. In one act of aggression, the collective
spirit of women and of the nation is broken, leaving a reminder
long after the troops depart. And if she survives the assault, what does
the victim of wartime rape become to her people? Evidence of the enemy's
bestiality. Symbol of her nation's defeat. A pariah. Damaged property.
A pawn in the subtle wars of international propaganda."

6. Helsinki Watch similarly
reports that "Whether a woman is raped by soldiers in her home or is held
in a house with other women and raped over and over again, she is raped
with a political purpose - to intimidate, humiliate and degrade her and
others affected by her suffering. The effect of rape is often to ensure
that women and their families will flee and never return." Helsinki Watch,
1993: 21.

[131] 7. For
another version of this event, see Helsinki Watch, 1993: 273.

8. The quoted passage
is from Amnesty International, 1993a: 1. In its global survey of "Human
rights violations against women" (1991), Amnesty isolates "Rape," "Sexual
humiliation, threats, and other abuse," and human rights abuses that involve
pregnant women as the gender-specific forms of rights violations against
women. Perhaps one would wish to add state legislation directed against
women who fail to conform to established state standards of "propriety,"
e.g. in Iran and elsewhere in the Muslim world. The Amnesty report adds:
"In addition to those abuses to which their sex makes them particularly
vulnerable, women also suffer forms of torture, ill-treatment and harassment
which are not gender-specific."

10. A relevant example
here is the town of Trnopolje, which was turned into a combination ghetto
and detention centre, and from which many of the accounts of rape and sexual
torture of women originate. "S.S.," a 40-year-old Muslim woman from Trnopolje,
told of the summary execution and mass incarceration of men when Serb forces
took over: "The army came to the village to take the men to detention centers.
There was a lot of blood on the streets. They killed and tortured them.
I saw it happen; they put the men together and called out names. Those
called by name were taken to a barn, and all we could hear were gunshots.
I didn't know where my husband was for eight days, then I heard he was
[incarcerated] in Keraterm [concentration camp]. In my village, about 180
men were killed. The army put all men in the center of the village. After
the killing, the women took care of the bodies and identified them. The
older men buried the bodies." Helsinki Watch, 1993: 58.

11. I mean, here, that
the decision to evacuate women and children from a community is often taken
by community members themselves; while voluntary armed service and gender-selective
conscription are disproportionately male phenomena.

12. Indeed, the paradigmatic
war-criminal is a young Serbian male, Borislav Herak, whose chilling testimony
of rape and mass murder before a tribunal in Sarajevo received wide publicity
in western media. See Burns, 1992. There are, however, regular reports
of women serving as guards in concentration camps. Testimony gathered by
Helsinki Watch from the Croatian-run detention facility of Dretelj in Bosnia
included references to "three or four women guards who were worse than
the men." One man's account included sexual torture at the hands of women
guards: "They would undress a man, line the rest of us up and make us perform
oral sex on him, another prisoner. There were two Ustasa [Croatian] women,
sisters, who liked to force us to do this: Marina and Gordana Grubisi.
They would make fifty to sixty of us do this. We would throw up and faint."
Helsinki Watch, 1993: 339. Small numbers of women volunteers have also
served in the armed forces of all sides, and there are accounts of women
joining men in ransacking and occupying Muslim households in Bosnia (see,
e.g., Helsinki Watch, 1993: 54).

13. Balkan women, on
the other hand, "whatever their ethnic and religious background ... have
been thrust against their will into another identity. They are victims
of rape in war" (Brownmiller, 1993).

14. See also the discussion
of a "climate of fear" in occupied territory, below.

15. Reporting from
the besieged Bosnian town of Mostar, Smith writes: "Normally about 120,000
people live in Mostar but many women and children have joined the estimated
122,000 refugees the conflict has produced. Males between 16 and 60 are
not allowed [by surrounding Serb forces] to leave the city even if they
have not been persuaded to join the [Bosnian] combatants."

16. In this case, the
U.N. resorted to helicopter airlifts in an attempt to circumvent Serb restrictions,
but these were much smaller in scale, leaving behind large numbers of trapped,
desperate, and wounded males who feared execution or incarceration when
Srebrenica fell to the Serbs.

[132] 17. See
also the account of the massacre at the village of Skelani in Srebrenica
municipality, in May 1992: "The shooting started at about 4:00 p.m., but
we were surrounded and could not escape. They finally entered the village
at 8:00 p.m. and immediately began setting houses on fire, looking for
men and executing them. When they got to our house, they ordered us
to come out with hands raised above our heads, including the children.
There were four men among us, and they shot them in front of us. ... I
saw another six men killed nearby." The account is given by Farima, a Muslim
woman. Helsinki Watch reports that "she and her children were taken to
the police station, where they were insulted but not harmed physically.
... The women and children spent the night in the police station and then
were transported from Bosnia." (All quotes from Helsinki Watch, 1993: 257,
emphasis added.)

18. For a more detailed
account of the massacre at Ugar Gorge, see Helsinki Watch, 1993: 34-42.

19. See also the Washington
Post press account cited in Helsinki Watch (1993: 73, n. 87) reporting
on the "ethnic cleansing" of the Bosnian Muslim town of Kozarac. "Prominent
Muslims in Kozarac were identified 'for arrest, detention and eventual
elimination' [quoting the Post]. Those identified included members
of Bosnia's parliament, judges, police officers, restaraunt [sic]
owners, entrepeneurs [sic], factory managers and local sports heroes.
Some were shot on the spot, while others were pulled aside and killed."

20. The organization
gives the population of Omarska, for example, as 2,000 men and 33 to 38
women (Helsinki Watch, 1993: 87). "Omarska appears to have been the most
brutal of the four Serbian-operated camps that were discovered by the press
during the summer of 1982. Almost all former Omarska detainees interviewed
by Helsinki Watch claimed that they had been bestially beaten, that scores
had died from the beatings and that some were executed" (Helsinki Watch,
1993: 89). There is no indication that any of the female detainees were
killed (Helsinki Watch, 1993: 113 and n. 154).

21. The instances of
such gender-based separation cited by Helsinki Watch are too numerous to
mention. See, e.g, Helsinki Watch, 1993: 52 (n. 51), 60, 65-66, 67, 69,
70, 74, 76, 80 ... . Similar procedures have been implemented by Muslim
forces in the areas of central and southwestern Bosnia they control or
have controlled. See, e.g., Helsinki Watch, 1993: 12: "After an area is
captured by Muslim troops, Serbian men between the ages of eighteen and
sixty frequently are taken to detention facilities and women, children
and elderly persons are asked to which area they want to be evacuated.
They are then placed on buses or trains and taken to the destination of
their choice."

22. Typical is the
account offered by "Idriz," a Muslim detainee: "Every night, guards would
read ten or fifteen names from a list. They read out the person's first
name, his surname and his date of birth. These men were then taken from
the room and returned later in awful condition. They were bloody, their
bones were broken and they were falling down, vomiting blood and fainting.
By morning, some would be dead. Actually, very few survived [the beatings]."
Helsinki Watch, 1993: 123. In general, greater constraints appear to have
been placed on violence against female detainees. The Helsinki Watch report
includes occasional testimony along these lines, such as these accounts
from the Trnopolje ghetto: "Women were sometimes interrogated at night
about their husbands but the women were not heavily abused; they were just
slapped several times" (1993: 145). "From time to time, they would kick
and beat women but not as brutally as they beat the men" (1993: 185). The
Serb-run camps that are generally held to be the least brutal (Manjaca
and Trnopolje) were also those with the greatest proportion of women and
the elderly. The most extreme (that is, murderous) abuses at these camps
seem to have been directed disproportionately against males: "Although
abuses in the Trnopolje camp were more random and not as bestial as in
Omarska, Keraterm and Manjaca, gross abuses did occur. Men were taken from
the [133] camp by guards and were subsequently 'disappeared"' (Helsinki
Watch, 1993: 139-40).

23. The kind of sexual torture and humiliation
regularly visited upon women in the Balkan conflict also appears to be
an occasional feature of the lives of male detainees. "Amnesty International
has received allegations of instances of male prisoners in detention under
the control of both Serbian and Bosnian Government forces being made to
perform sexual acts with each other. However, these reports are few in
comparison with the numerous reports and allegations of rape or sexual
abuse of women." Amnesty International, 1992a: 5. For an example of sexual
torture of males - in this case, at the hands of women - see note 12.

24. Such manipulation
carries over to western commentary, as Neier (1993) notes. Legal scholar
Catharine MacKinnon has cited a figure of over 50,000 women and children
raped in the Balkan conflict, and "another 100,000 killed." As Neier points
out, MacKinnon's phrasing is ambiguous (perhaps deliberately so?); the
100,000 figure actually refers to all victims of the conflict, most
of whom are men. This has not stopped the statistic from circulating in
media commentary, however: "MacKinnon, who is representing the Bosnian
victims pro bono, puts the total at 'more than 50,000' women and
girls raped, and another 100,000 women and children killed" (Halsell,
1993: 9, emphasis added).

25. For one example
of this kind of balanced, gender-sensitive investigation outside the present
context, see Indian feminist Madhu Kishwar's report on the 1984 anti-Sikh
rioting in New Delhi following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. "The
nature of the attacks confirm that there was a deliberate plan to kill
as many Sikh men as possible, hence nothing was left to chance. That also
explains why in almost all cases, after hitting or stabbing, the victims
were doused with kerosene or petrol and burnt, so as to leave no possibility
of their surviving. Between October 31 and November 4, more than 2,500
men were murdered in different parts of Delhi, according to several careful
unofficial estimates. There have been very few cases of women being killed
except when they got trapped in houses which were set on fire. Almost all
the women interviewed described how men and young boys were special targets.
They were dragged out of the houses, attacked with stones and rods, and
set on fire. ... When women tried to protect the men of their families,
they were given a few blows and forcibly separated from the men. Even when
they clung to the men, trying to save them, they were hardly ever attacked
the way men were. I have not yet heard of a case of a woman being assaulted
and then burnt to death by the mob." Kishwar, "Delhi: Gangster Rule," in
Patwant Singh and Harji Malik, ed., Punjab: The Fatal Miscalculation
(New Delhi: Patwant Singh, 1985), pp. 171-78. My thanks to Hamish Telford
for bringing this source to my attention.